The Sisters of St. Dominic have kept a motherhouse on Albany Avenue in Amityville since the 1870s, and this summer something new is growing behind it. Hidden Blooms Flower Farm, a one-acre u-pick flower field and native plant nursery, held its grand opening on the motherhouse grounds on July 19, and the Sisters announced it themselves: a hidden treasure, in their words restated, right on their own land at 555 Albany Avenue. On Saturdays and Sundays through October, anyone can walk the rows and cut a bouquet.

What is actually growing there

This is not a pumpkin-patch operation with a few sad marigolds at the edge. The summer field list runs to a dozen varieties: zinnias, cosmos, snapdragons, celosia, strawflower, statice, sunflowers, dahlias, gomphrena, ageratum, yarrow and amaranth. Earlier in the season the farm offered berry picking alongside the flowers. The planting is deliberately dense and deliberately varied, because the farm bills itself as regenerative, meaning the soil is managed to improve year over year rather than be mined for one season of color.

The nursery side sells native perennials, the plants that actually feed Long Island pollinators, which is a quiet but pointed offering in a region where most garden-center inventory is imported ornamental stock. If you have been meaning to convert a corner of the yard to something bees can use, this is a place to start, and the people selling you the plants grow them a few feet away.

The setting is the surprise

The Amityville name tends to drag a certain haunted house behind it wherever it goes. This is the other Amityville. The Sisters of St. Dominic Motherhouse Complex has anchored Albany Avenue for a century and a half, and the campus was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. Most Long Islanders have driven past the property without any idea what sits behind the trees.

A working flower farm on convent grounds sounds like an anomaly, but it fits a long pattern. The Sisters have treated their Amityville land as something to be tended rather than banked, and opening an acre of it to neighbors with clippers in hand is about as direct an expression of that as exists. Their announcement of the farm's opening read as genuinely delighted, and the campus itself, with Rosary Hall rising behind the field, gives the place a setting no other flower farm on Long Island can match.

How a visit works

The public hours are Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the farm has said it will run those weekend hours into October. That matters, because late August through early October is the best of the season: the dahlias and sunflowers peak just as everything else in a Long Island garden starts giving up.

There are two quieter ways in as well. The farm offers golden hour sessions on weekend evenings, 7 to 8:30 p.m., when the light over the field does the work a photographer usually charges for. And on Wednesdays through Fridays the field is available by private booking for birthdays, proposals and photo shoots, reserved by email through the farm's site. Mondays and Tuesdays it is closed entirely, which is when a farm this size does its real work.

You cut your own stems in the field, which is the whole point. A bouquet you assembled yourself from a dozen varieties, snipped an hour ago, is a different object from anything a supermarket cooler can produce.

Why this is worth the drive

Long Island's u-pick culture is one of its genuine advantages, but nearly all of it lives out east: the orchards, the berry farms and the sunflower fields cluster in Riverhead, Mattituck and points beyond, an hour or more from most of Nassau and western Suffolk. A flower farm in Amityville puts the experience twenty minutes from a huge share of the Island's population, on a property most people have never had a reason to enter.

The season has a clock on it. The field runs weekends into October, and the varieties at their best right now, the dahlias especially, are the ones worth the trip. Bring clippers if you have them, bring a vase with water in the car if you are smart, and go before the first frost decides the question for you.